


how do you like my torture?

by luna_cheshire



Category: Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe
Genre: Going to Hell, M/M, Post-Canon, canon remember?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-08
Updated: 2017-01-08
Packaged: 2018-09-15 19:26:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9252419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luna_cheshire/pseuds/luna_cheshire
Summary: Faustus is taken to Hell, and Hell is not a nice place to stay (even when you have a friend around)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [обжигая холодным взглядом, станешь ядом](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2955614) by [luna_cheshire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/luna_cheshire/pseuds/luna_cheshire). 



> posting a translation two years later. well, you asked for it! :)

Things that cost nothing on Earth can be worth your souls’ immortality in Hell.

On Earth, they touch each other all the time throughout these twenty-four years, it gets casual as breathing, but Hell has different rules. The only thing Mephistopheles lets himself is to brush Faustus’s forehead with the tips of his fingers; the touch burns like scorching steel and leaves a mark for sure; maybe, deep down in the corrupted soul of his.

On Earth, they talk, more than that – they discuss, they gossip, they _chat_. Hell is deafeningly loud, and, to be honest, there are not many topics to talk about (they have a couple, but discussing them would hardly be proper: how do you find my new torture? Spent a whole weekend inventing). They tell each other only the important words: my Faustus – as a greeting, but the answer is not pronounced aloud although one can read numerous hissing syllables of the name in the pained curve of parched lips.

On Earth, they travel: Rome and Naples, new continents, sunken continents, the future and the past. On Earth, they listen to music: living composers and dead ones, during receptions, concerts, on vinyl records, they secretly change fates and laugh about it so carelessly, irresponsibly. In Hell, there is only one music: pain, and only one travel: pain, and the laugh can only have one definition – painful, but the laugh is there, and no Hell can take that away (is it not a torture: to watch how he laughs in your face when winced in a long spasm, devils dancing on the knot of nerves, crowd there like on the needle’s point; you can hear loud moans and shouts and ridiculous prayers, and briberies, as if these useless souls have anything to bargain with, and this all is around, stifling, obsessive, unbearable to suffocating burned and blackened lungs, but he giggles idiotically and carelessly, just like he used to before, giggles and then laughs openly in your face; for whom is this torture?).

On Earth, they were both free in some imaginary sense. Although, the freedom of Hell is just as imaginary, and there is no need for justification.

On Earth, one of them has been falling in love with another for twenty-four years, and another was fated to return the debt for the remained eternity. How do you like this torture; spent a whole weekend inventing.


End file.
